This exercise produced a very entertaining menagerie - and, not surprisingly, an equally intriguing cast of human observers going about the double work of description, both evoking what they're looking at and revealing something about human lives in the process. In CJ Allen's sly and evocative parrot poem, we meet a sharply-etched, gnarled old bird, and in the process encounter the couple who care for this memorable creature.

The Parrot by CJ Allen

They were not married, exactly, but they had a parrot, they told me, of indeterminate but certainly great age. It swung in bell-shaped cage

that hung in the window, preeningits ludicrous pelt of feathers:viridian, sulphur, blue,and a sort of shimmery orange, its eyes like cracked glass,

its beak of ancient shellac.They were not married to each other, but the parrot was, they told me, in joint ownership, and could shatter brazils

with a staggering report,like splintering boards. Its horned and polished claws shifting equivocally on the perchlent it an unbalanced look.

They were not married, at leastnot in the conventional sense, they told me, but the parrot spoke for them, sometimes in doubtful Irish, sometimes French.

Allen creates a pleasingly complex sonic texture here; the rhymes of exactly/me and age/cage, and that lovely procession of vowels in the line "its beak of ancient shellac" are musical and soothing. But cracked/shellac begins to harden the sonic progression, and sets up the shock of the poem's strangest lines, in which those brazil nuts get cracked open with startling intensity. Listen to those ragged consonants: shatter, staggering, splintered, horned. There's a subtle but fierce sense of threat in there; this bird is not to be messed with.

Workshop leaders are forever pruning repetition, seeking compression, but Allen's poem is a fine example of the suggestive power of saying things more than once. Three times we read "they were not married", and twice, "they told me" and with each reiteration we hear more of the poet's irony. This couple is in fact more than married, it seems; joined by this fierce and irascible character who vocalizes, in two languages, what they don't say themselves.

Carol Beadle's bat is in a far less powerful position.

Bat by Carol Beadle

You're too near the ground, too still.And, in the time it takes to find a shoeboxand line it with newspaper, you haven't moved.

I pluck you gently from the bricks,cup your russet body in my hands.Jolie laide, you're ill.

Indoors, I consider why emphatic ears,a snub face and the leather webbing of your wingshave put you in the company of black cats

and hares - ascribed with properties beyondthemselves. Maybe it's that fondness for the dark.I read of children flogged to let the witchcraft out,

unwanted women burned. You're supposed to be partof a squealing crowd erupting from a sunset tower,I'm supposed to be afraid. You shift, a little.

Beadle's poem opens with measured and careful description, then snaps alive at line six, when the speaker's address to the bat - "jolie laide" - is suddenly both more intimate and more literary. The speaker has gendered her bat, and in doing so begun to establish common ground with her. Now the bat is no longer part of a tradition that the speaker understands has likewise demonized cats and hares, and, of course, women. "I'm supposed to be afraid," the speaker says, and there's hope there, as well as in the fact that the little creature is still stirring.

But a great many of our encounters with animals, inevitably, are meetings with the dead, and the elegy leads almost inevitably to moral matters, to considerations as to how we should live.

To an Ant Fallen in the Salt Shaker by Andrea Cohen

I too have mistaken itfor sugar: the bright blizzards

are similarly blinding, inviting,and once you have

an ache for nectarturning back is hard.

But there's one rule to follow:if a dozen easy portals seem

to lead to pure confection,if the way in

to sweetness seems directand seamless, beware. The lair

of sugar is heavy-lidded, is protected.You must rely on someone

other than yourselfto unlock that fort.

At least this is what I have found.Which is not to say that had

you ended in the bowland not the shaker you would

not otherwise have drowned.You would have.

But the aftertaste is longand might have been less stinging.

By opening with that "I too have been mistaken" the poet lets us know that her poem is out to consider the problematic nature of desire and the difficult situations into which it leads us. Her poem is entirely parable, so it doesn't have the particularized creatureness of the parrot or bat above - but it doesn't need to. Cohen's out to present us with a wry fable, and how fitting to shape it in couplets, with these rhymes and near-rhymes chiming all along the way. These formal devices help to underscore the poet's control of tone here, pointing to the way in which her song is playful and rueful at once - but only a little rueful. She will clearly take desire any day, despite the consequences.

It's interesting to notice that slippery pronoun in Cohen's poem - "you" is sometimes the reader, or anyone at all, and sometimes it's the ant. This is a deft touch; it underscores the fact that Cohen thinks we're all in that doomed ant's position, and may as well go for the sugar instead of the salt.

AC Clarke's slow-worm (what we call in the US, I believe, an inch-worm) is also addressed in the second person.

To a Slow-worm (Anguis Fragilis) by AC Clarke

You were doing your best to be twigbent at each end when I saw you. Something hard to define -

the faint sheen of your skin, your smooth outline, your air of being damaged somehow,confirmed the link between us.

I thought you dead until you slowly raised your glove-puppet head, just a slit of mouth to mark it,eyelids still shut

as if you couldn't quite believe your luckin coming out of whatever it was alive.You did seem fragile then,

half-formed. It hurt to look at you, as it doesto look at an embryo doubling weak fistsin a belljar, birthcord trailing -

misplaced concern: you could live yearsseeking little beyond the next mealthe next patch of sun

not moved to inhabit any skin but the one you're at home in, not struggling to word yourself into shape.

I suppose all poems about animal life involve some degree of projection; since we can't know, really, what's going on in those heads, we tend to use them as mirrors. Clarke's poem is pleasingly self-conscious about this. We learn from the beginning that the character of the worm (how wonderful, to individuate this tiny anonymous thing!) is "hard to define." When the speaker says, "I thought you dead," we're signalled that perception of something so alien can't quite be trusted; this speaker might misunderstand everything. Seeing the little worm as a survivor, then as stillborn - all seem ways of reading the creature as an extension of the viewer, until that smart final stanza. The writer of the poem is, of course, the one who's moved "To inhabit any skin" - to feel what it's like to be a worm, and has just spent seven stanzas in the aching process of "trying to word yourself into shape."

I'll end with a poem that takes the audacious step of taking projection much further, and letting the observed animal do the talking.

Cockroach by Randall Mann

You may not remember me.I lived in Sand Lake Hills,where there was sand, but no lake,no hills; I lived in half-truths.

I was gated. I playedwith my Anne Sextonaction figures; I played adolescence.Nothing came between me

and my Calvins, not really,and I was gay for pay -not really. I was the kid in Fairvilla Videowith a taste for gangbangs.

Is it all coming back to you now,like a chalkboard song?I was the canvasser in front of Walgreens,the one you almost never avoided.

I was Mr Roboto, thank youvery much: I was another punch cardat the computer center. I was code,a cloud of Drakkar Noir

in the Shady Oaks Mallmen's room. I was a hangnail,the garnish in your cocktail.I was your cockroach in Orlando,

the one who crawled on you at night.

Who is the slippery, many-faced character who's speaking to us here? Not quite an insect, but a kind of ventriloquisation of the persistent, invasive, inescapable aspect of desire. Mann is far more unsettled about the nature of longing than Cohen, who advises her ant to drown in sweetness. Mann's bug is instead that annoying wanting that won't leave you alone, as irritating as chalk that screeches on the blackboard, that annoying 80s pop song about "Mr Roboto", or an irritating hangnail. And I can't read those last lines without imagining some dismal night in a Florida motel, the speaker hounded by desire. It's particularly unsettling somehow that it's "your cockroach" and not the cockroach - this unpleasantness is personal. This is a fine example of a poem that perhaps started out in one place - considering a cockroach - and then allowed metaphor to go its inventive, revealing way, uncovering depths the writer might not have expected.

And, I have to give Mr Mann credit for his invention of the Anne Sexton action figure. Is there a marketer out there paying attention?